This article is a survey of the literature on appeal, emphasizing its significance for political regimes rather than for individual litigants.

This article explores the way that a set of cases arising from a specific event, product, or claim form a congregation of cases that displays common features and that traces a discernable career over time. Such a career is related to, but not uniquely determined by, the course of the social activity that underlies the type of case. The relation of activity and case congregation is mediated by a complex structure of disputing activity (including norms, cognitive dispositions, institutions of access, stakes and resources, social support, legal services, and more). In addition to these external influences, such litigation itself influences its future course by various effects on the underlying activity, on the organization of disputing about it, and on the legal setting. Such endogenous effects include holistic effects associated with the size and distribution of the congregation and career effects associated with the way that the congregation unfolds over time. Delineation of these various effects suggests that litigation lives “a life of its own,” partly independent of underlying events in the outside world, but that the regularities in the litigation process are not reducible to a comprehensive pattern since the activity is interactive and strategic.

A field experiment in Dade County, Florida, evaluated the use of a pretrial settlement conference as a means of restructuring plea negotiations. All negotiations took place in front of a judge and victim, defendant, and arresting police officer were invited to attend. The conferences were brief but generally reached at least an outline of a settlement. They usually included at least one lay party although lay attendance rates were quite low. The change in the structure reduced the time involved in processing cases by lowering the information and decisionmaking costs to the judges and attorneys. No significant changes were observed in the settlement rate or in the imposition of criminal sanctions. There was some evidence that police and victims who attended the sessions obtained more information and developed more positive attitudes about the way their cases were handled.

Several years ago we conducted surveys in one American (Detroit) and two Japanese (Yokohama and Kanazawa) cities exploring the nature of responsibility and sanctioning judgments. Recently we were able to replicate a portion of those surveys in Moscow, and here we compare the results of the Moscow survey with the earlier findings. The fundamental question is whether socialist societies, at least as they have existed in the republics of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, have created a contextual legal culture like that of Japan, or whether their legal culture is more like the individualistic model of the United States. Our data indicate that when presented with situations of wrongdoing, Moscow residents' punishment preferences more nearly resemble the individualistic preferences of Detroit residents than they do the contextual preferences of Japanese residents. However, unlike Japanese and U.S. residents, the Moscow residents also expressed a preference for quasi-criminal educative sanctions.

We examine whether Galanter's repeat player (RP) concept helps in deciphering the law-related behavior of Russian enterprises. We adapt the RP concept to the Russian context defining the Russian repeat player (RRP). Using data from 328 enterprises, we examine whether RRP-ness explains the use of protokols of disagreement, petitioning to freeze assets, contractual prepayment, and litigation activity. RRPs are very different from Galanter's RPs, generally exhibiting less aggression and innovativeness, but suing other RRPs frequently. Examination of factors other than RRP-ness suggests the presence of lawyers is important in determining law-related activity, a result not necessarily expected in Russia.

This essay examines the popular American daytime courtroom programs Judge Judy and People's Court and comparatively analyzes two distinct models of law and justice developed in these shows. Using the techniques of qualitative media analysis, I argue that Judge Judy represents a shift in the way popular culture imagines the role of law in the lives of ordinary people. This shift accords with neoliberal notions of governance and individual self-responsibility for protection against risk. Conversely, People's Court represents an older, liberal-legal model of law that emphasizes individual rights, public participation in the court process, and due process. By demonstrating the supersession of Judge Judy justice over that of People's Court, I argue that this shift in the way law is imagined in American popular culture signals wider shifts in American and indeed international attitudes toward the law in our everyday lives.

The legal profession as it exists in India today had its beginnings in the first years of British rule. The Hindu pandits, Muslim muftis and Portuguese lawyers who served under earlier regimes had little effect upon the system of law and legal practice that developed under British administration. At first, the prestige of the legal profession was very low. From this low state and disrepute the profession developed into the most highly respected and influential one in Indian society. The most talented Indians were attracted to the study and practice of law. The profession dominated the public life of the country and played a prominent role in the national struggle for freedom. “There was no movement in any sphere of public activity—educational, cultural, or humanitarian—in which the lawyers were not in the forefront.” However, after independence the relative prestige and public influence of the profession declined.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, throughout the Pacific Rim, European and American colonizers reorganized indigenous systems of property rights in land to make them look more like European property systems, with disastrous effects for the indigenous people involved. The very first of these schemes, however, was the Māhele of 1845–1855, which took place not in a colony but in the independent Kingdom of Hawaii. Why did the Hawaiians do this to themselves? I argue that the Māhele was a sophisticated and partially successful response to the prospect that Hawaii would soon be colonized. The object of the Māhele was to ensure that in the event of annexation, Kamehameha III and other elite Hawaiians would not be dispossessed of their landholdings. The strategy was to convert those landholdings into a legal form that would be recognized by an incoming colonial government—whether American, British, or French—as private property.

In prosecution, as in armies, prisons, and schools, organization matters. Japanese prosecutors work in an organization that differs markedly from the organizations in which their American counterparts work. This fact has important implications for how prosecutors in Japan define and perform their central tasks and thus for the quality of Japanese criminal justice. Most critically, the Japanese way of organizing prosecution enables prosecutors to effectively manage the tension between two imperatives of justice that American regard as often incompatible and always in tension: the need to individualize case dispositions and the need to treat like cases alike so as to achieve “order.” As mirror and model, Japan can teach the United States how to improve the level of order in its own systems of criminal justice.

In the two years from June 20, 1971, to March 10, 1973, Japanese courts decided four pollution injury suits colloquially known in Japan as the “big four.” This litigation and the social and political movements that accompanied it are of great interest from several perspectives, including the doctrinal development of Japanese tort law. This article, however, will focus not on the legal or political impact of the litigation, but on the way in which cultural and social factors influenced its course. I attempt to illuminate thereby a side of the Japanese legal system that is ordinarily hidden from view, i.e., the interface of modern Japanese society and the formal legal system.

This paper discusses Japanese research on legal consciousness (ho-ishiki) and civil disputing. The author presents a recent explication of Takeyoshi Kawashima's concept of legal consciousness as a cultural factor and also proposes to explore the possibility of treating it as an individual, attitudinal factor. He also reviews large-scale surveys of aggregate-level culture and studies on individual-level disputing behavior. The need and possibility of a longitudinal study of individual disputing behavior that uses individual-level attitudes and regional culture as explanatory variables is suggested.

An experiment was conducted to assess the preferences of undergraduates and inmates for two possible modifications of plea bargaining: allowing the defendant to participate and including a state-paid or community-volunteer mediator in the negotiation. Respondents were asked to role-play a defendant who was either innocent or guilty of a murder and confronted with either weak or strong state's evidence. Results indicate that all defendants preferred plea bargaining procedures which included the defendant. Undergraduates preferred procedures which involved a mediator, but inmates were neutral toward this modification. Undergraduates preferred a state-paid mediator, while inmates preferred a community volunteer. Several interactions qualifying these effects are discussed in the paper.

Discussion of the distribution and delivery of legal services usually turns on the problem of civil justice for the poor. Our attention is so dominated by the problems of distributive justice for the poor that we ignore the more general problem of civil justice for the public.

In Western society the primary function of law has been the protection and regulation of property. Indeed, the earliest liberal conceptions of public life are founded on the premise that men gave up an utterly private life in order to enjoy the utilities provided by public protection for their persons and, even more important, the fruits of their labors—in Locke's (1689: Art. 123) phrase, "their lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name property." In the earliest liberal tradition, the holding of property is the foundation for participation in public life; accordingly, the principal end of the civil law is the definition and protection of property rights.

Parole was introduced in California, and used for over a decade, primarily to relieve governors of part of the burden of exercising clemency to reduce the excessive sentences of selected state prisoners. Later, when parole was additionally used to relieve prison crowding, processes were initiated that eventually led to the adoption of a rehabilitative justification for parole. We outline these events and their background and briefly consider their implications for the study of penal reforms.

This paper examines the use of legal claims by government officials and citizens in everyday political encounters involving civil rights. Data come from 580 letters sent to the federal government between 1939 and 1941, and from the replies sent by the newly formed Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department. In almost every case, the department refused to intervene and explained its refusal by making legal claims about federal jurisdiction. These legal claims masked the department's discretionary choices and thus helped depoliticize the encounters. Surprisingly, however, a substantial number of letter writers challenged the government's legal claims by deploying their own legal and moral arguments. The willingness of these citizens to challenge official legal pronouncements cautions against making broad generalizations about the capacity of ordinary people to respond effectively when government officials deploy legal rhetoric.

This study demonstrates how the structure of dispute resolution shapes the extent to which managerial and business values influence the meaning and implementation of consumer protection law, and consequently, the extent to which repeat players are advantaged. My analysis draws from, links, and contributes to two literatures that examine the relationship between organizational governance structures and law: neo-institutional studies of law and organizations and socio-legal studies of repeat players' advantages in disputing. Specifically, I compare an instance where powerful state consumer protection laws are resolved in private dispute resolution forums funded by automobile manufacturers but operated by independent third-party organizations (California) with one where consumer disputes are resolved in public alternative dispute resolution processes run and administered by the state (Vermont). Through in-depth interviews and participant observation in the training programs that dispute resolution arbitrators undergo in each state, I show how different dispute resolution structures operating in California and Vermont give different meanings to substantially similar lemon laws. Although my data do not allow me to establish a causal relationship, they strongly suggest that the form of the dispute resolution structure, and how business and state actors construct the meaning of lemon laws through these structures, have critical implications for the effectiveness of consumer protection laws for consumers.

This research, utilizing qualitative methodology with grounded theory, develops a model that illuminates a process by which judicial stereotyping associated with genetic essentialist biases toward mental disorders may affect judges' views regarding the sentencing and punishment of offenders with mental disorder diagnoses presented or understood to be genetically influenced. Data, collected through interviews with a sample of 59 Pennsylvania State Court judges, suggest that judges exhibit stereotyping behavior by linking the relationships between three particular genetic essentialist biases (immutability, informativeness, uniformity) and three types of stigmatization (pessimism, dangerousness, family stigma) associated with each bias. When judges exhibited this stereotyping behavior without the effects of intervening conditions, they then expressed how knowledge of the genetic influences of an offender's mental disorder would negatively influence views on punishment, specifically related to more restrictive sentences and support for deterrence and incapacitation. Three intervening conditions associated with judges' personal characteristics (personal experiences involving genetics, strength of determinism vs. free will beliefs, having no personal experiences with mental disorders) influenced whether judges' sentencing views were negatively influenced by such knowledge on genetics. Implications related to therapeutic jurisprudence are discussed.

Why do some states diversify their supreme courts sooner than others? Using original data on the first black and female state supreme court justices, I contend that political and institutional pressures influence when states diversify their high courts. The results suggest that selection systems, institutions affecting turnover, and the appointment of political minorities to the United States Supreme Court are associated with states seating their first black and female justices. The findings have implications for our understanding of the political and institutional circumstances that promote judicial diversity.

A citizen's judgment of wrongdoing in an organizational setting may depend on characteristics of the citizen, of the accused, or both. In 1993, random sample surveys exploring judgment of corporate wrongdoing were carried out in Washington, DC (N = 602), Tokyo, Japan (N = 600), and Moscow, Russia (N = 597). Respondents heard hypothetical vignettes about wrongdoing in organizations and were asked to judge the actor's responsibility and related issues; they also provided demographic information and recounted their attitudes toward corporations. Education was more powerfully related than social class to responsibility judgments. In the United States, education's effects on responsibility were indirect, operating through attitudes toward obedience and toward corporate accountability. Russian and Japanese results were unmediated by attitudes. It appears that responsibility is primarily a function of sociolegal factors (such as aspects of the case) and secondarily a function of social characteristics and the sense of similarity or difference they engender. The article concludes by discussing general issues in accountability within corporate settings across cultures.

Economic and legal reforms have triggered waves of conflict over property rights and access to urban land in Vietnam. In this article I develop four epistemic case studies to explore the main precepts and practices that courts must negotiate to extend their authority over land disputes. Courts face a dilemma: Do they apply state laws that disregard community regulatory practices and risk losing social relevance, or apply community notions of situational justice that undermine rule formalism? I conclude that reforms designed to increase rule formalism in the courts may have the unintended consequence of reducing the capacity for judges to find lasting solutions to land disputes.